Psalm 53 "Perfectly Whole" Scott Hoezee

In the last six months we have had ample opportunity to find the adjective "corrupt" modifying the noun "politics." How distressing it was last fall to hear dark rumblings from Florida about corrupt practices at polling places. It was not the spectacle of dimpled chads that caused the most unease but rather the rumors of minorities being turned away from polls and the suspicion that hand re-counts were being influenced by partisan wishes. More recently we have been angered by the cloud of corruption which has hung over various presidential pardons. The specter of influence peddling, of quid pro quo, deflates our spirits, threatens to make us cynical. But that's what corruption does: it spoils, it disintegrates, it unmakes otherwise good things. Corruption turns the good into something that looks bad.

A classic example of corruption comes from the 1948 Senate election in Texas between Lyndon B. Johnson and Coke Stevenson. According to LBJ biographer Robert Caro, Johnson's victory in that election was a pivotal turn in LBJ's career--without this victory it is unlikely LBJ would have ever have become vice-president and then president. Yet it appears that this key turning point was corrupt. The outcome of that race was tighter than the results in Florida last fall: in the final tally LBJ beat Stevenson by a mere 87 votes!

Yet in several key precincts LBJ received credit for hundreds of votes which were most certainly not cast for him. After the election, and when it was too late to do much about it, an election official discovered one curiosity on the ledger from Precinct 13: someone had taken a pencil and neatly added a half-circle to a 7, thus changing it to a 9. With that jot of pencil lead LBJ's vote total in Precinct 13 jumped from 765 votes to 965.

Matters were odder still in another precinct where this official noted that the last 200 people who voted all voted for Johnson. This official then looked at the precinct record sheet on which registered voters signed in. Those last 200 names, however, were all in the same handwriting and in alphabetical order from A-Z, and then starting over at A again! Now this election official was wily: he figured out that the odds were against the last 200 people showing up in alphabetical order. So he did a random sampling and went out into the precinct to interview a few of these folks. Quite a few indicated they had not voted for either LBJ or Stevenson seeing as they stayed home and didn't vote at all. It's always unhappy, of course, when people don't exercise the great privilege of voting, though in a few cases in the 1948 election this was understandable since a number of those last 200 voters had spent election day in their respective graves at the local cemetery.

Corruption makes so much of life seem like a sham, a farce. But it is not merely in politics that we encounter corruption. The doctrine of original sin says that we all have two main problems: guilt in need of forgiveness and corruption in need of healing. God desires to deal with both afflictions, and in Christ Jesus we believe God has done so. But it was not easy. The power of the devil's corrupting influence is fierce. Paul claimed in Romans 8 that God can turn all bad things to our good. Alas, the devil is forever seeking to turn all good things to our bad. The devil corrupts us, corrupts our hearts, corrupts our spiritual vision. Step One in that dark process is eclipsing God from our line of sight.

Psalm 53 begins, "The fool says in his heart, 'There is no God.'" As we have said before, what that verse describes is not atheism the way we encounter it today. In recent centuries a philosophical atheism has developed which tries logically to argue that there is no God anywhere in existence. But most people in the Ancient Near East simply assumed the reality of gods and goddesses. So what the fool means in verse 1 is, "There is no God here." There may be a God existing somewhere in the world but his presence is restricted. The fool thinks that God mostly does not notice what goes on in various corners of life.

What this foolish perspective denies is God's design for, and hence investment in, every part of life in his creation. God created a cosmos, not a chaos, an integrated whole, not a fragmented series of this-n-that. God's desire is the webbing together of all creatures into patterns of wholeness. So what the fool blocks from view in saying "God is not here" is precisely creation's integrity. All of life matters to the God who created all that life.

This is the first step in the corruption of creation: we deny that God has any interest in most facets of life. "Why would God be interested in what happens in people's bedrooms?" we've all heard modern people ask at one time or another. First we restrict the scope of God's interests and this, in turn, frees us up to make our own decisions.

Last Sunday the New York Times Magazine featured an article on what author Alan Wolfe termed "moral freedom." Americans, he wrote, fought for economic freedom in the 19^th century, for political freedom in the 20^th century, and now the new battle will be for moral freedom. No longer will people simply obey a set of rules handed down by some higher authority. The Bible says we were created in God's image in part so that God could communicate his creation designs to us. Things like the Ten Commandments are not arbitrary hoops for us to jump through but the owner's manual for life in God's creation. It is the image of God which allows us to receive the gift of this information from God.

But now people want to use this very ability not to follow what God says but instead to negotiate with the divine. As Wolfe noted, is it any wonder that Americans have made best-sellers of that series of books titled Conversations with God? Moral freedom means that no longer do we conform to God's vision, but God has to comport with where we are at. We want a say in what's right and wrong. So when the average American hears some precept for moral behavior, he or she may well respond the same way as when a doctor suggests surgery: "I'd like a second opinion."

Here is an entire attitude, an entire way of going at life, which does not need to be forgiven but changed, re-oriented. What's more, unless it is changed, this corrupt viewpoint will lead to still more corruption. Corruption is like a drop of ink in a glass of water: it's only a matter of time before it spreads and colors everything.

First our attitude gets corrupted, then the actions which spin out of that attitude corrupt still other things. First we deny God's rules for proper use of his gifts and then we make up our own rules which misuse what God gives. Sexuality is an obvious example. In Christian marriages we refer to sexual union, to the tender, lovely uniting of husband and wife into what is called "one flesh." In this context sexuality fosters unity, love, and delight--it fosters a celebration of the body. But when perverted, sexuality becomes the cause of rage, division, hatred, and self-loathing.

Children who are molested tend to have two reactions, both of which are glaring examples of sin's corrupting influence. One, sexually abused kids tend to despise their own flesh. Self-abusive behavior wherein children burn cigarettes into their arms or cut themselves often results from someone's corrupting touch. A second effect of such abuse is multiple personality disorder. A child's mind cannot absorb what a trusted father or uncle did to her, so she disassociates herself from herself, creates alternative identities where she can take refuge. She tries to believe that this horrible thing occurred on another child's body, happened to a different person altogether. Such mental splitting is disintegration--a dis-integrating--of the mind, a fragmenting of the wholeness and integration God desires.

Sin as corruption is also able to turn virtues against those who possess them. Return with me to that 1948 Senate race in Texas. LBJ's opponent, Coke Stevenson, was renowned for his integrity. Stevenson believed in people, had faith in the common sense and goodness of the average voter. These were noble traits. Yet LBJ found a way to corrupt them. Early in the campaign LBJ began to suggest that Stevenson was against the Taft-Hartley labor act--a law popular with Texans. In reality Stevenson was not remotely against Taft-Hartley--this was so obvious a misrepresentation that Stevenson felt it was beneath him to respond. Stevenson believed voters already knew how he felt about this issue. Alas, if you repeat even obvious untruths often enough, people start to believe you. Just this happened in 1948 until Stevenson knew he had to respond after all. But it was too late.

Here is a classic vignette of corruption: LBJ exploited someone's virtue, took some of the excellencies of Stevenson's character and turned them into something negative. In this situation LBJ did not even deprive his opponent of his good traits--as a matter of fact, this act of corruption depended on Stevenson's maintaining his virtues! But the same thing happens all the time. A bossy husband knows that his wife's meekness will let him get away with ordering her around. When someone else comments on this less-than-nice treatment of the woman, the husband responds, "Hey! She's not complaining!"

It seems that there is no good thing which evil cannot somehow manage to make bad. Philip Yancey once wrote about what he labeled "the great law of unintended consequences." No matter how much good intention lies behind a certain program, development, or invention, someone somewhere can find a way to turn it in a bad direction. The Internet is one of the most startling fonts of information ever developed. Almost immediately, however, online pornography grabbed hold of this new medium and is now one of the most-used and profitable components of the Internet.

A few years ago Congress passed a bill which classified drug addiction as an unemployable disability in a compassionate effort to recognize an addict's helpless condition. The result? Thousands of addicts got doctors to certify their medical condition, thus qualifying them for retroactive payments from the federal disability fund. As one social worker put it, "Can you imagine what a drug addict does with a $20,000 check!?"

"Will evildoers never learn?" is the psalmist's plaintive cry in verse 4. It is a valid question. On their own corrupt evildoers will never learn. The kind of corruption that makes us turn from God or deny God's interest in all of life is something that needs to be healed with gospel medicine. Only conversion in Christ can quite literally turn people around. But even as your and my conversion has not resulted in sin's complete disappearance, so we are not yet fully immune to corruption, either. We, too, need to be spiritually vigilant about corrupt ways of life. So how can we combat corruption in our lives? What are some spiritual disciplines which we can think about in this Lenten Season that will re-integrate us?

One way is to resist the pop postmodern idea that truth is situation-specific, that it varies depending on time and place. We need to be on guard against anything which suggests that God's interest in the details of our lives is at best mild and that what God desires varies depending on the circumstances. We need to resist the idea that the proper shape of life in this creation must be decided by committee and by mutual consent only.

Yes, there is much in life that is desperately complex. Yes, there are any number of situations where we are faced not with a single moral issue but with overlapping, conflicting, or competing moral issues. In those situations we do come up with study committees at synod, we do put our heads together to discern the right course. But there is a big difference between that and the idea that all of life is finally just a matter of opinion or convenience.

Ultimately we need to be people who cultivate good spiritual hygiene, which may well be the opposite of a corrupt life. As Neal Plantinga points out, "hygiene" comes from the Greek word hygiainoo, which is often translated as "soundness" in Paul's letters. Interestingly, though, when the Greeks translated the Hebrew Old Testament into Greek (in what is known as the Septuagint) they used hygiainoo to translate the Hebrew word shalom. We need to be people of good spiritual hygiene in the sense of people who cultivate a life marked by integrated wholeness, by "shalom."

Physically good hygiene is not just flossing your teeth or washing your hands. In fact, the very desire to exercise the individual practices of hygiene depends on a larger sense of wholeness and health at the core of your being. Maybe that is why when people are mentally ill, hygiene is one of the first things that gets neglected. When your mind gets corrupted by illness, you stop noticing that your shirt tail is untucked, that your hair is a mess, that you've got remnants of lunch stuck in the corners of your mouth. So when I worked at Pine Rest, we kept track of something the doctors and nurses abbreviated as "ADLs," or "Activities of Daily Living." These ADLs for patients included brushing their teeth, combing their hair, washing their face and hands, and just generally doing the things which go into an integrated, well-kempt appearance.

Spiritual hygiene, attending to the myriad of "little" things which contribute to a sound and healthy spirit, also gets neglected due to the corruption of sin. Sometimes we also need prompting to attend to our spiritual ADLs. We need to attend to God's Word, gaining an ever-keener sense of what life is supposed to look like. Another ADL would be confession of sin, having a candid sense of where we fall short of what we learn in God's Word. Along with this we attend also to prayer and to the various components of prayer, which include thanksgiving. Spiritually healthy people are grateful people--they make efforts to pay grateful attention to life. Sound Christians find themselves often feeling thankful for things like fresh days, sunshine, meatloaf, the laugh of a child, hot coffee, and even just an average day at work. Being able to notice these things and give thanks for them is evidence of a sound and healthy spirit, of someone who is both looking for life's excellencies and pursuing them as well.

Earlier I said that corruption can make so much of life look like a sham, a farce. In political corruption what becomes sham-like is the importance of every vote that gets cast. If the outcome of an election is being determined by someone's fraud, then John Q. Public is just going through the motions when he votes. Corruption of the human heart similarly creates false fronts, facades, shams. Corrupt people don't ring true.

Corrupt people cultivate not true hygiene but only good exteriors--masks which hide an addiction to pornography, a greedy heart, a snooty spirit, a life cloven by raging envy. The opposite of all that is genuine spiritual soundness which rings true through and through. So if we find areas of our lives at variance with what we'd want people to see in us when they meet us in the narthex or at the mall, then these are the things we need to target, pray about, work on. The more our Christian life looks even to us like a false front, the more we need to combat the devil's attempts to corrupt even our faith.

Because the fool says in his heart, "God's not around, he doesn't see or notice what I do." But the wise, Spirit-filled person, says, "God is here, there, and everywhere. And he is good. He watches me but only because he cares." This is good news to the uncorrupted heart. The other piece of good news is that in the long run, as we see so arrestingly on the cross, God has done an end-run on the devil. That great law of unintended consequences is for now one of Satan's tools by which to corrupt what God makes good. But in the last analysis that very law boomerangs back on the devil as the bad thing which is the death of God's beloved Son turns out to be something very good after all. "Everyone has turned away, they have together become corrupt," the psalmist laments. The gospel's call is for everyone to turn back to Jesus, who is shalom incarnate--we turn to Jesus because together we long to be perfectly whole. Amen.